Friday, October 12, 2007

VFP 9 SP2 Released

I saw this posted on Andrew MacNeill's blog first (but also reported by almost everyone else I subscribe to in the Fox Community). Microsoft has released the VFP 9 Service Pack 2. We talked about this last night at DAFUG after Cathy Pountney's excellent rehearsal for her Southwest Fox session "OutFox the VFP Report Writer: Printing on My Terms."

Head over and read Milind Lele's brief note on the release. A couple of notes, this is not the release of Sedna (the Xbase tools and .NET extensions to VFP 9). This will be released separately. I am not sure why these were released separately, but can guess that there are some legal issues to be ironed out to get the Sedna code posted on CodePlex under the shared source license.

One small typo in Milind's letter: he notes about not installing this over one of the "betas." He correctly instructs VFP developers to not install this over a CTP or beta. You need a clean install of VFP 9 RTM (release to manufacturing with no service packs), or the VFP 9 SP1. The typo is the word "betas." I am a little surprised that Microsoft only released one beta for this service pack. Sure we had a few CTPs along the way, but those were definitely alpha releases. Alpha releases are made before the feature set is finalized. Even under the normal service pack release process we saw a beta and release candidates. Throw on top of this the concept that this could be the last service pack released I expected at least one release candidate after the original beta. I am a little surprised we only saw one beta.

Last night during Cathy's presentation she ran into a bug under Vista where right-clicking on the method code editor freezes VFP after the shortcut menu is displayed. You can break the freeze several ways, but definitely a pain in the neck and not something I see in the list. Maybe it was fixed and overlooked in the bug list, or maybe I missed it in the list.

I am hopeful the Fox team listened to the posts about bugs and did some fantastic internal testing. Fingers crossed. Now I have to determine if I override my "no installs" two weeks before a conference rule and get this loaded before Southwest Fox.

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4 Comments:

At 10/12/2007 11:10:00 AM, Anonymous Dave Aring said...

Rick...

Imagine the little red devil sitting on one shoulder with his pitchfork. On the other shoulder is the angel (complete with halo). Both are there for their own motives. The devil WANTS you to upgrade to SP2. Mainly, because the first six letters in DEMONStration are DEMONS! On the other hand (er, shoulder) is the angel; there to remind you that you made the "two week rule" for a specific reason under a set of specific circumstances. DON'T mess things up. FOLLOW your rules. October 22nd is soon enough to install SP2. I am begging you! The world is begging you! Attendees at the SWFox Conference are already getting in line to view the train wreck if you upgrade!

...Dave

 
At 10/12/2007 01:04:00 PM, Blogger Rick Schummer said...

{smile}

Yes Dave. But I do have the ability to have both VFP 9 RTM, SP1, and SP2 all on the same computer.

The temptation is great.

 
At 10/12/2007 01:04:00 PM, Anonymous Colin Nicholls said...

I recommend installing SP2 over a clean RTM install, rather than SP1. Some FFC classes in SP1 do not get patched correctly.

 
At 10/12/2007 01:26:00 PM, Blogger Rick Schummer said...

Thanks for this advice Colin. Sounds like lessons learned the hard way.

 

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